The psychophysics of perceptual memory
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 19, 2026

A Two-interval Forced-choice Task for Multisensory Comparisons
Published on: November 9, 2018
1Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway. svein.magnussen@psykologi.uio.no
Abstract:
Psychophysical studies of short-term memory for attributes or dimensions of the visual stimulus known to be important in early visual processing--spatial frequency, orientation, contrast, motion--identify an early perceptual memory system. The proposed system, which may be part of the Schacter-Tulving perceptual representation system (PRS), is located early in the visual processing stream, prior to the structural description system responsible for shape priming but beyond primary visual cortex (V1), and consists of a series of parallel special-purpose perceptual mechanisms with independent but limited processing resources, where each mechanism is devoted to the analysis of a single stimulus dimension and is coupled to a memory store. The experimental evidence for this hypothesis is reviewed.
Related Concept Videos
Sensory Memory
Traumatic Memory
Factors Affecting Perception
An illustrative example of a perceptual set is the scenario where an airline pilot told...
Eyewitness Memory
One such error is memory distortion, which occurs because human memory does not function like a...
Explicit Memories
Episodic memory contains information about personally experienced events and is reported as a story. An example of episodic memory is recalling a birthday celebration. This type of memory includes the what, where, and when of an event, as...
Perception
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...

